Do the crime, lose the pension

Freshman legislators send message about corruption by officials

By Jordan Carleo-Evangelist

Updated 8:25 am, Thursday, March 6, 2014

Albany

Every freshman member of the Assembly — including five from the Capital Region from both parties — signed on to a bill that would strip public officials convicted of felony corruption of their pensions, the bill's sponsor said Wednesday.

The broadening support for the bill among those who traditionally have the least influence in the Legislature, while symbolic, is far from a guarantee that it will ever become law.

But the renewed push among members of the Legislature's lower chamber comes as yet another one of their own, Democratic Brooklyn Assemblyman William Boyland Jr., awaits a verdict in his federal bribery trial.

And it may also signal that the body's newest members — those with the least ties to the Legislature's scandal-stained status quo — feel greater pressure from voters to be seen as part of the solution.

"I don't think we're as jaded yet," said Assemblyman Dan Stec, a Queensbury Republican among the freshmen backing the bill. "(We) don't have that corporate memory of how we got here."

Broadly, the bill would clear the way for voters to amend the state constitution to block "any state or local officer" from collecting a public pension if he or she is convicted of "a felony involving a breach of the public trust."

That would apply to a wide range of both elected and non-elected state and local officials.

If passed, the measure would dramatically expand on a pension forfeiture provision of a 2011 ethics reform package that only applied to public officials not already in the state pension system at the time — that is to say, no sitting lawmakers.

The problem, said Assemblyman David Buchwald, a Westchester Democrat and the bill's lead sponsor, is that even many new state lawmakers are exempt from that reform because they have been in lower elected office for years.

"The reality is the vast majority of New York state public officials entered the public pension system well before then and therefore continue to operate under the old rules," Buchwald said.

Buchwald's proposed change requires an amendment because public pensions are constitutionally protected.

As a result, the bill would need to pass two consecutive Legislatures before heading to the statewide ballot.

Dueling Senate versions of the legislation also leave its future uncertain. State Sen. Neil Breslin, a Bethlehem Democrat, is sponsoring the Senate version of Buchwald's bill.

A competing Senate bill sponsored by Long Island Republican Sen. Carl Marcellino would apply only to elected officials and only to pension credits they amassed while in they office they disgraced, not any benefit accrued before then.

That bill is co-sponsored by Halfmoon Republican Kathy Marchione as well as several members of the Independent Democratic Conference, which shares power with the GOP in the upper chamber and thereby controls the flow of legislation.

While the details differ, Buchwald said the core message is that there is broad, bipartisan agreement that lawmakers convicted of felonies shouldn't continue to profit from the offices they betrayed while behind bars.

Breslin said he has no doubt that if the constitutional amendment did ever reach the ballot, "it would pass by much greater margin than it would pass in either house" of the Legislature.

Stec noted that he and Assembly's other minority Republicans have offered their own bills seeking to seize corrupt politicians' pensions.

"We're in conceptual agreement," he said. "Good — so let's get something done."